Each month, we like to keep an eye out on what’s going on in the web design/development, CMS, and security communities. Knowing you might not be able to keep up with all the news coming at you, we gather up content that we think you might find helpful or interesting and share it in these roundups. These are some some of our favorites from November. Enjoy and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Google + for the same great content the rest of the month.

Web Design and Development

15 New CSS Tools for CodeGeeks – CSS tools serve as an important asset for web designers and developers when it comes to simplifying their workflow and improving better CSS write-up, which is the endeavor that every web designer and developer strives for.

Responsive HTML Emails: a Different Strategy – Email has become quite the funny thing. It follows us everywhere. To the grocery line. To the dinner table. To the… shower? (Well… why not.) So when we set out to rethink the FogBugz email notifications from the ground up, we knew we had to ensure a great in-shower email experience—and that meant optimizing for mobile.

5 Things Web Designers are Afraid of but Shouldn’t Be – Unless your job as a designer requires you to wear multiple hats, it can be easy to become content in doing only what you’re an expert in. You’re comfortable with your process and feel at home in Photoshop, HTML & CSS.

How HTML5 Crashed, Burned, And Rose Again – In April of 2010, Steve Jobs penned an open letter titled “Thoughts on Flash” in which he stated the “new open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win”. Facebook seemingly later validated Jobs’ thought when rumor came of a major initiative called Project Spartan that would make Facebook apps completely based on HTML5.

Responsive Design Won’t Fix Your Content Problem – I spoke to a digital team at a large corporation a while back, and outlined some of the many challenges they were likely to face in creating, revising, and publishing their content so it would work well on smartphone, tablet, and desktop interfaces.

Tetris & The Power Of CSS – To be really good at CSS, you have to learn CSS. I know this sounds like a tautology but I’ve become aware of a peculiar attitude that preprocessors such as SASS are somehow successors to CSS.

How to Write Simple, Elegant CSS with Compass & Sass – A lot of designers use some sort of CSS pre-processor, whether that be Sass, LESS or Stylus. If you’ve used any of these, you’re probably also aware that Compass is a framework built on Sass, and although its installation may be off-putting, once you use it you’ll quickly discover it’s one of the best skills any web designer can learn.

Content Management Systems

7 Tiny Tweaks to Improve WordPress Content Management – The WordPress admin is arranged to suit the general needs of most people who will be using it to publish content. Depending on the volume of content you’re creating and your habits in the admin, you may find that you have unique needs.

Infographic: 10 New Features of Joomla! 3.2 – On November 6th the Joomla Project and Community announced the availability of version 3.2 as a stable release. With about 600 new features and bug fixes, version 3.2 is the biggest release of the CMS ever. In the infographic below 10 new features of Joomla 3.2 are highlighted, Something New for Everyone!

27 WordPress SEO Plugins – You can’t optimize a site for natural search if your platform doesn’t give you the tools. That’s why WordPress continues to be the most popular blogging platform, with a huge developer community and many search engine optimization plugins.

The Great Documentation Migration – Earlier this year, we made the decision to simplify our server infrastructure and unburden ourselves from managing and maintaining a Java server for the MODX documentation, which at that time, was in Atlassian Confluence.

Security

Top Signs that You’ve Been Breached – Because data is often the most valuable corporate asset – especially when customer information is concerned – staying alert for potential compromise is a critical IT job. Unfortunately, looking into a potential data breach is not easy.

Feeling Insecure? Because Your Passwords Are – Last month Adobe announced hackers had nabbed the account information of 2.9 million users–customer IDs, encrypted passwords, and other data. Then, a few weeks later, they jumped that estimate up to 38 million people.

How To Fix Your PC, The Right Way – It’s happened to us all. You get home from a long day at work and you want to blow off some steam with an hour of gaming or maybe browsing the web, but when you tap your mouse button or punch the power switch, the unthinkable happens.